VMware Workstation Home Lab Setup Part 7 – Management Tools

Nov 8, 2014 • Jonathan Frappier

So now we’ve got two ESXi hosts and our domain controller running in the home lab, it’s almost time to setup vCenter however, in a real world scenario you would need a way to get vCenter onto the ESXi hosts (because of course you are virtualizing vCenter). Up until now what we have done through the DCUI would have been at a keyboard and mouse or virtual KVM (such as Cisco UCS or HP iLO) and we cannot create virtual machines via the DCUI. So, what tools are available to manage our ESXi hosts to start creating virtual machines?

You can download the Windows vSphere client from the ESXi getting started page by navigating the IP address of one of your ESXi hosts (like was done in the last post at https://192.168.6.11). If you are running Windows 8.x you will need to download a J++ package and install it before proceeding with the Windows vSphere Client, thanks to my friend Matthew Brender for reminding me of that gotcha which also means you will need to turn on the .NET Framework 3.5. To do so, open the Start menu, go to Control Panel >> Programs and Features and click Turn Windows features on or off. Tick the .Net Framework 3.5 box and click OK

Once .NET 3.5 is enabled and J++ is installed, download the vSphere Client, run the installation wizard and log in to the IP address/host name of your ESXi host as root.

You will be prompted for a username and password and are then connected and can run cmdlets in PowerCLI to import or create new virtual machines.

Since we are using VMware Workstation, we can also use that to connect to the ESXi hosts (or a vCenter server later) as well. In VMware Workstation, click on File >> Connect to server. Enter the IP, username (root) and password to log in. You can now create virtual machines on your virtual ESXi host running in VMware Workstation from VMware Workstation!

In the next post, we will use the vSphere Web Client and PowerCLI to import the vCenter Server Appliance for our home lab which will provide (obviously) vCenter, Single Sign-On (SSO) and the vSphere Web Client which is where we will do most of the work through this series.

So day to day I help maintain a bunch of vApps that run, but are also disposable. When we are finished with them I just want them gone. I am working on a PowerCLI script to help automate this process and saw the Stop-VApp cmdlet. Comparing that to the Stop-VM cmdlet there was no -kill switch in Stop-VApp so I wasn’t sure how to just “pull the plug” - after all I don’t care about the vApp at this point.

So had a need to clone a vApp several times, I finally got around to automating that task thanks again to PowerCLI. A few things I had to consider; with the New-VApp cmdlet you cannot select portgroups so I had to do that after the vApp was cloned and also needed to put the vApp into a specific folder after it was cloned. Other than those two considerations, it was actually kind of easy to figure out (at least based on what I needed to accomplish). Two thing I could not do in this script - place the cloned vApp into a datastore cluster and allow storage DRS to make the initial placement. Instead, I am relying to SDRS to balance the datastores after the power on operation. Also I could not force the virtual disk format size, I want them all thick, eager zeroed so instead I ensured the source vApp was set properly.